This could have gone under my COVID-19 Creations entry, but since I have some process pieces here I decided to give it a full post! Really this is just one drawing based on that hyper-popular true-crime Netflix series released during the coronavirus lockdown, Tiger King. So as I often do, let’s start with the finished piece:

Alpha Flight... assemble?

I got the idea of doing Tiger King characters as comic book characters from this CBR "Line It's Drawn" article. My image depicts the main character, Joe Exotic, as Captain Marvel. The little guy is one of Joe’s various husbands, John Finlay, as the pint sized hero Puck. Finally, I'm calling the man/tiger creature in the back Tiger-squatch, and he is based on the Alpha Flight character Sasquatch. This team is taken from a specific incarnation of Alpha Flight from a few years ago that had Captain Marvel as its leader - I'm only vaguely familiar with it but decided to use it in my Netflix/comic mash up nonetheless!

Onward to process, the first step here was creating a rough concept. Here are my initial doodles, the red circle wound up as the winner but a He-man version would have been great too. Joe Exotic riding a “Battle cat” style tiger… hmm, maybe next time.

Once the doodle was set ,I gathered some reference for the three figures. I wasn't really going for photo real likenesses or anything, but having some idea of face shape, etc. is always helpful.

Yes, these are some strange dudes

With reference in hand it was time for rough pencils, or tiger-scratch if you will?

Next I added a layer over the roughs and did fairly tight finished pencils in Clip Studio.

I intended to print out these pencils and traditionally ink them, but I lost steam on the project and opted to just color them in Photoshop and call it a day. And that, boys and girls, is how you turn one drawing into a whole blog post!